By : Dr. Elizabeth Shove Centre for the Study of Environmental Change Lancaster University, U.K.

Let us begin by walking into an imaginary room. What do we see? A light switch on the left beside the door, grilles in the skirting and sealed windows over to the right. We could be in any hotel room or in any office in almost any part of the world. Now lets try another room in another building. Still the same light switch on the left, again a window, though this time one which opens, and now a radiator and a thermostatic valve with numbers one to ten. There are various gadgets to fiddle with here, the window opens, it has a catch with three positions, and the valve turns: our capacity for action, as users of the building, is clearly greater.

Standing alone in the first room we find that choices have been delegated to an array of technologies and that our relationship with the outside world is mediated by an invisible army of proxy "users". In the second case, interaction is more direct. When it is cold outside it is we who twiddle the knob on the radiator. When it is hot, it is we who yank the window open and we who choose where to set the catch.

These hypothetical rooms have much to tell us about the interaction of users, designers and buildings, and the inter-linking of environmental issues. In attending to these questions this short paper focuses upon two themes of real significance for sustainable building design. The first concerns the creeping homogenisation of indoor climates around the world. The second touches on questions of methodology and approach, and relates to the terms in which designers and users conceptualise indoor environments.People are rather sensitive creatures, rarely able to survive prolonged exposure to the elements. Going beyond the minimum criteria of survival, designers and building scientists have sought to specify the parameters of comfort. Standardised physiological tests underpin equally standardised conclusions about appropriate set points and indoor environmental conditions. Research findings have generated design guidance which has in turn influenced actual building construction. Going full circle, occupants' understandings of normal and acceptable indoor climates now reflect standards embodied in these buildings.

The two imaginary rooms described above represent different responses to the "need" to achieve standard "comfort" conditions whatever the weather outside. The high-tech fortress approach, represented by the first room, is increasingly common. Here, the building effectively excludes the outside world and depends instead upon the artificial manufacturing of its own indoor weather system. In this way (and perhaps this is the only way), designers are able to create and maintain the same conditions the world over within increasingly standardised building forms (the office block, the shopping mall etc.) constructed from increasingly standardised materials and systems, and produced for trans- national companies and their wary financiers. Standardised indoor conditions both reflect and maintain standardised ways of life: office hours converge, the siesta goes out of fashion, styles of clothing become more uniform, and seasonal variations are forgotten as people come to rely upon predictably artificial indoor environments.

Of course, the designers of the second room were also concerned to provide comfortable conditions for the building's occupants. The difference is that in this case management of the indoor environment involves rather greater interaction between the building and its users and between climatic conditions inside and out. Here, the indoor environment is a creative achievement, not a foregone conclusion. For this and other reasons, the system is less predictable and less reliable. There are times, perhaps many times, when textbook conditions are simply not met and when the room is, according to conventional standards, too hot, too cold, too draughty, too stuffy, too dark or too light.

Managing the first building and the first room is rather like driving a motor boat. Once the engine is switched on there is not much else to do. By contrast, the second room requires continual manual adjustment in response to the changing weather. As if in a sailing dingy, occupants have an active part to play and variable conditions are both expected and accepted.

In the long run, sustainable building depends upon a shift away from motor launches and unassailable climatic fortresses and toward (perhaps back toward) sailing ships and localised, climatically sensitive structures. But for the time being, the spiralling trends of climatic and cultural standardisation pull in the opposite direction. Design conventions, founded upon the results of physiological research, have had the double effect of fuelling particular forms of technological development at the same time engendering new and converging expectations regarding comfort and control. Ways of life are coming to depend upon uniform conditions made possible by energy intensive heating and ventilating technologies and building users are getting accustomed to simple on-off switches.

These few observations raise important questions about the co-evolution of the built environment and socio-cultural expectations of comfort. We need to know more about this process, and, in particular, we need to know if there are ways of resisting the seemingly inexorable trend toward standardisation. More immediately we should review the design process itself, paying special attention to the unintended consequences of accepted methods of calculation, of standards and set points, and of the ways in which designers think about and develop strategies for heating, lighting and ventilation.

Although the common aim is to arrive at a solution which meets recognised standards for heating/cooling, lighting and ventilation, design labour is traditionally divided along specialist lines. Areas of expertise have grown up around different professions and technologies and hence around different aspects of indoor environmental control. These divisions are curious when we consider the process of building use from the occupants' point of view. When people enter a room they don't "see" heating, ventilation and lighting. Instead they see switches, dials, doors and windows.

In our two hypothetical rooms, responsibility for indoor environmental control is variously distributed between current occupants and the invisible technologies which effectively take their place. But it is not just the number of opportunities for intervention which vary. As we have seen, such opportunities also take different forms. For example, the ten settings on the thermostat offer a relatively precise level of control, the detailed effects of which would be simply obliterated by the cruder act of opening the window. To complicate matters, users' actions (such as opening a window), tend to have simultaneous consequences for more than one aspect of the indoor environment. Indeed active trading between different aspects of comfort is normal practice (it makes sense to keep windows shut, even on a hot day, when the alternative is to have papers blowing all over the place.

This is all rather problematic for it is difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of the dynamics of actual building use in terms of the discrete design languages of heating, ventilation and lighting. The static vocabulary of set points and design standards is similarly limiting. Of course it might be possible to put active users in the centre of the stage: to see the room through their eyes and develop indoor environmental strategies which focus upon the multi-dimensional mechanisms of control (the window, the thermostat, the switch etc.) rather than upon the more familiar science-based elements of environmental quality. The difficulty is that we don't as yet have any way of conceptualising and really thinking through the indoor environmental implications of the interactive process of building use. This is an important omission for without such an alternative way of thinking it is tempting to continue to construct buildings around fixed, seemingly universal, features of human need, turning people into parameters, relying upon tried and tested standards, and viewing users as the passive beneficiaries or victims of designers' decisions.

In conclusion, there are two areas of current practice which deserve further attention if we are to think strategically about sustainable building design. One relates to the use of design standards and set points. The other concerns conventional conceptualisations of building users and their relationship to the technologies of environmental control.On the first point, I have suggested that designers' reliance upon standard definitions of comfort is an important factor in the world wide development of climatic fortresses: that is of buildings which exclude the outside world and which depend upon the energy intensive manufacturing of indoor environments. Such standard definitions are a creative force, forging, not merely reflecting, expectations of comfort. In the long run, the risk is that increasing numbers building users will come to expect unsustainably uniform indoor environments.

Designers are understandably interested in producing buildings which cater for most of the people most of the time. But these laudable aims have led them astray. Rather than recognising and contending with the adaptability and creativity of building occupants, the response has been to build for average "Joes" and "Joesephines", and to place enormous faith in the conclusions of physiological studies and other forms of technical enquiry. Designers have re-assembled strands of scientific evidence (from thermal comfort research, from work on lighting, colour and perception etc.,) and fed the resulting conclusions into the already separate sub-disciplines of heating, lighting and ventilation design. This tendency has helped to promote the science, rather than the culture or anthropology of comfort, and has supported and reinforced unsustainable trends toward standardisation.

What are the implications of this discussion? One conclusion is that familiar and seemingly innocuous design standards have far reaching and potentially devastating implications for energy consumption and hence for the sustainability of the outdoor environment. If so, the challenge is one of re-introducing variety and resisting standardising tendencies which have been fuelled and fostered by conventional approaches to building design.

This article is one of a series presented at the CIB TG-8 International Research Workshop, Linking & Prioritizing Environmental Criteria, held in Toronto in November, 1995. The workshop was co-sponsored by the Green Workplace Office of the Ontario Realty Corporation, CANMET and GBIC. The full 200+ pp. proceedings are now available from the Ottawa GBIC office: Tel: 613 232 2330 Fax: 613 232 7018 email: larsson@greenbuilding.ca

But it is hard to know where to begin for shared reliance upon design standards has had the further unintended consequence of foreclosing otherwise important areas of debate. It is, for instance, difficult to find a context in which we can think again about culturally variable meanings of comfort and the role of building designers, building occupants, clothing manufacturers and others in achieving these conditions. The science of comfort also cuts short potentially significant discussion and negotiation about costs, benefits and limits. At what point does it matter that a room is "too hot" or "too cold". More significantly still, whose decision is this to be? When does "discomfort" become a real problem, when it is a problem worth doing something about, and what environmental cost are we prepared to pay to resolve it?

These questions hint at a much broader agenda. What is the role of the built environment in protecting inhabitants from the natural elements, and what threats does the design and management of the indoor environment present for the long term future of the world outside? In cracking open this debate we need to extend the range of our enquiry. It is not enough to search around for closer, more collaborative relationships between "owners, architects, engineers, contractors, occupants, and operators" in pursuit of more and more sustainable ways of providing what have now become reified standards of indoor comfort. Instead, we need to recognise the malleability and negotiability of those seemingly fixed requirements. Rather than taking "client demand" for granted, we need to look at the ways in which design professions and others have helped to create what may prove to be unsustainable expectations regarding the nature and form of the built environment. As suggested in this paper, the standardising side-effects of building science, and conventional element by element approaches to building and systems design have much to answer for. What is needed, to counter these effects, is a different way of looking at buildings. Such an approach needs to focus upon the cultural variability of building occupants and upon their creative, multi-dimensional interaction with the built environment.

.